Choosing the Best Cat Food

Understanding Your Cat's Diet

What to Feed Your Cat

Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Catdryfood.jpg

When your cat or kitten already has a nice name and a happy home, your next concern would be his cat food and his diet. When the kitten is between seven and eight weeks old, he might require four or five small meals a day and a little warm milk. Milk must never be given cold to any cat. Due to its rapid growth rate, the kitten demands more protein and a higher caloric consumption than a full-grown cat. This must continue until he's eight or nine months old when both growth and activity start to slow down.

Your cat can be given prepared canned cat foods with a few extra canned fish, baby foods, particularly meats, and a one-minute egg yolk in his warm milk. By the time he's four months old, he would only require two meals a day. The adult cat must be fed solid cat food twice a day, early in the morning and early in the evening. The bowls and the area where he eats must be kept clean and pleasant.

Because cats are carnivores, wildcats and feral cats kill animals smaller than they are for food. They eat the whole kill—viscera, flesh, and bones. This also includes the contents of the victim's stomach at the time of his sudden demise, like grass. In this manner, the unsupervised cat automatically gets a well-balanced diet even when some of it may be secondhand. Keeping a cat as a pet puts the obligation of its diet on the owner. In other words, your meals should be as appealing and nourishing as a dead mouse.

A cat's nutritional demands are like ours, but cats need more protein-rich food. This should constitute approximately 30 percent of the cat's overall intake. Cats are not fussy eaters if their owners don't make them that way. Carefully chosen, commercially prepared cat foods ensure your cat of a nutritionally balanced diet. These could be supplemented by table scraps, like bites of meat, mashed potatoes, and vegetables, but these foods must not constitute more than one quarter of his total intake or they can ruin the balance the prepared food offers. The large producers of prepared foods dedicate substantial amounts of money to research on nutrition, and their know-how is reflected in the product. A breakdown of the content of the food would appear on all packaging.

Dry cat food provides your cat what he needs and could be fed either as it comes from the bag, or moistened using water. Vitamins and minerals have been added up, and the content listing shows whether or not it has the required 30 percent protein. An additional advantage to the convenience of dry food is that it can be left alone in the cat's bowl all day. Unlike dogs, who would turn over garbage cans and clear out the refrigerator, then show up for their evening meal as usual, cats have a propensity to eat only if they are hungry, and oftentimes leave food in the bowl.